Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (6 page)

Then she’d look like a pretty mo
ther, but she still wouldn’t act like one. Other mothers watched out the window and knew when their kids got skinned knees. When it got dark, they stood on the porch and hollered for their kids to come in. They got mad when their kids went out in the cold without jackets. They told them to brush their teeth and say their prayers. And they let their kids call them “Mommy.” Dorthea wondered why Ermel didn’t act like a mother.

The screen door slammed, and the children looked up. Dad had come home. Their punishment was over. Tommy, the four year old, had spilled milk on Ermel’s gossip magazine, and they’d been restricted to the tiny bedroom that all six of them shared. It’s a good thing Ermel’s gin bottle hadn’t been knocked over or they’d be hanging by their thumbs. She got mean when she drank. They both drank, but only she got mean. He made long speeches and had a temper but not a mean one.

Now they
had their freedom. Two of the older kids climbed out the open window and ran into the orange California twilight. The three younger ones ran out the bedroom door, past the grownups in the kitchen and out the front door. They still hadn’t figured out that getting too close to the grownups at this time of day sometimes meant getting a talking-to, or getting sent to the neighbors to beg for cigarettes. Dorthea stayed behind.

The year was 1928 and Dorthea
had turned twelve, old enough to know she’d had a rotten childhood and curious to know if things got better as an adult. To that end, she’d recently taken up listening in on the grown-ups. She quietly stepped over one of the two mattresses on the floor and edged over to the doorjamb, the best spot to listen in on Jeb and Ermel when they talked at the kitchen table.

“Is that it, just this hillbilly pop?” said Ermel.

“I don’t place no orders, Ermel, if you don’t like it, drink milk. It sure won’t do you no harm.”

“I’d drink milk before
I’d drink rotgut that some dumb hayseed made in a dirty washtub.”

Dorthea heard
Ermel open the squeaky cupboard where she kept her gin bottle. Every day it started out in that cupboard, like a rarely used spice, and every day she opened the cupboard two dozen times. Her own kids knew the sound of that squeaky cupboard better than they knew the sound of her voice. By late afternoon, the show ended and the bottle stayed on the kitchen table next to her cigarettes and ashtray. And if she ran out of the good stuff from Canada, she’d drink anything—whether it came from a washtub or not.

Dorthea heard her set
the bottle on the table and sit down. And then her father sat down too.

“I seen Joe Tanner up at the
market,” he said. “Of course he’s still puttin’ on airs. Now he’s tellin’ everyone how the rich folks wave to him when they pass by.”

“Puttin’ on airs don’t seem so bad to me, if you got somethin’ to put on airs about,” said Ermel.

“Joe Tanner ain’t got nothin’. Gettin’ a house like that ain’t so hard if a person puts his mind to it. And let me tell you, if it was me, you wouldn’t catch me strutin’ like a peacock.”

“Well, since it ain’t you, I guess we won’t never know for sure, now will we?”

“We do know, Ermel, ‘cause I’m tellin’ you.”

“And I’m tellin’ you, if I had to choose between a man who ain’t got no money and a man who’s got money and thinks he’s a sheik, I’d be takin’ belly dancin’ lessons right quick.”

They liked to rile each other. It’s what they did every night. Dorthea heard her father loudly exhale tobacco smoke.

“If that’s the way you see it,” he said, “
ain’t nobody should be more puffed up than me—and don’t say it ain’t true ‘cause you know it is.”

Ermel didn’t say anything.

“Come on, Ermel. You’re the one who thinks Joe Tanner’s somethin’ special ‘cause he wears a bowtie and has indoor plumbing.”

“
Don’t start, Jeb.”

“I just got one question
for you, that’s all.”

“I ain’t in the mood for it—and the
neighbors ain’t neither.”

“We’re just talkin
. Is there somethin’ wrong with that? Now tell me, who owned Sunny Slope Manor before the Newfields?”

Ermel
didn’t answer. Dorthea heard her father’s chair slide away from the table.

“Tell me who owned
the manor, Ermel!” he yelled.

“Prospector Railer,” she said
, unenthusiastically.

“That’s right! Prospector Railer! My
great granddaddy! My family! Not Joe Tanner’s family, not any of the big shot families on the hill, and not even the Newfields, the biggest big shots of all! My family owned Sunny Slope Manor! Now tell me Ermel, who should be puttin’ on airs, me or Joe Tanner?”

If Ermel knew anything, she knew how to light
Jeb’s fuse. She stood up and said, “Joe Tanner, ‘cause he’s got money and you ain’t got shit.”

The sound of glass breaking against the wall echoed through the little house.

“I ain’t got shit ‘cause they took it from me!”

“You ain’t got shit ‘cause you spend all your time fussin’ over somethin’ that happened a hundred years ago. If you tried think
in’ about today for a change, I’d be livin’ in a house like Emilou Tanner, and I’d be wearin’ decent clothes like she wears!”

Dorthea entered the room.
She didn’t scare easily, especially when she had something on her mind.

“Why don’t you just
tell the police?” she asked.

They froze
in place.

“If they took
Sunny Slope Manor from you, why don’t you just tell the police and get it back?” asked Dorthea again.

They stared with flared nostrils and fiery eyes. And then Ermel busted out laughing, followed by Dorthea’s father. They collapsed into their chairs, grabbed their glasses, and drank—him his
rotgut and her the last of the gin. Then, since he’d broken her bottle on the wall, he gallantly poured a glass from his bottle, which she consumed with vigor.

“Dorthea, come over here and sit down. I’m gonna explain somethin’ to you.”

She sat next to him at the table. He smelled.

“Right and wrong don’t matter, Dorthea. Rich people
, who ain’t got nothin’ to lose, like to talk about right and wrong, and good and bad, but it don’t mean nothin’—unless you’re at the doctor’s office and he cuts out the wrong doohickey instead of the right one, then it matters.” He laughed at his joke and held up his glass. Ermel touched her glass to his and laughed along. Then he continued, “Now listen to me, Dorthea. If I tried tellin’ the police what the Newfields did to me and my family, they’d laugh in my face. They like throwin’ people in jail but right and wrong don’t got nothin’ to do with it. If you’re lookin’ for some words that will get you somewhere, forget about right and wrong and go with give and take, ‘cause that’s really how things work. Look around, every minute of the day, every day of the year, and you’ll see the world is full of nothin’ but givers and takers. Now they might disguise it real good, and call it somethin’ fancy, but they’re just a bunch of givers and takers.” He stopped talking long enough to take a puff and a drink, then he looked real serious and said, “And if you want to get down to brass tacks, you gotta decide which one of those words you like best. That’s what happened to my family, we never cared enough to think about it, so we ended up with the short end of the stick. Instead of being takers who get everything they want, we ended up being givers who worry about shit like right and wrong. The Newfields got Sunny Slope ‘cause they took it, and we don’t got it ‘cause we give it. We just never got the hang of takin’.”

He looked down at his glass, took a drink, and then
said, “Nobody never told me these things when it mattered. If they had, maybe things would be different.”

That night
in the crowded bedroom, on her part of the soiled mattress, Dorthea stared out the window at a perfect moonlit view of Sunny Slope Manor. That had long been her routine: gaze longingly up at the manor and let it gently lead her into a slumber land with powerful queens and strong castles and perfect rightness. Not on this night. She didn’t come close to entering slumber land, and, if she had, it would’ve been a world of thieves and cheaters and no rightness at all. It would’ve been her father’s world, where big fists and big appetites are all that counts. Had he been right? Did they live like rats because they didn’t have the guts to reach out and take something better? Sure, he got drunk and told wild stories, but he also knew more about rich people than anybody. And look at the duchess lady. She’d wanted babies, so she took Judith and Abbey. Just flat out took them. And then Ermel wanted one back, so she took her. Everybody taking, just like her father had said. His words banged in her head like a rock in a tin can.

Maybe motherly love is like cooked carrots, not very exciting, but good for you if you get enough of it. Dorthea got a miserly portion and never saw much good in it at all.

When love isn’t an option, sometimes the next best thing is hate. It beats yearning for an embrace that will never come, and then withering and dying. Dorthea didn’t have it in her to wither and die, or to live with Ermel, listen to her, brush against her every day of her life, and then pretend that love existed when it didn’t—that would’ve been pointless and even harder than hating. So, when the affection never flowed,
resourceful Dorthea found sustenance in hate.

It’s true that Jeb did occasionally seem to have genuine affection for his kids, but not enough to fill the void left by Ermel or to nudge Dorthea in a different direction. If anything, he imparted to his eldest daughter the opinion that men are little more than explosive oafs who sometimes tell jokes and pat you on the back. By age sixteen, though, her opinion of her father had become less generous than even that.

~~~

As the rattletrap Ford bounced along, Dorthea looked over at her dad. She’d given
up hoping that he’d ever make good on any of the big things he talked about. He didn’t believe that stuff anymore himself. Sure, he still made loud speeches, but instead of sounding bold and exciting, like a daredevil holding the reins on a hundred wild horses, he sounded like a tired man trying to remember a speech. He had a handsome face, honest looking eyes, and the gift of gab—everything needed to make good—and he’d traded it all in for a whole lot of empty talk.

The old jalopy hit a pothole
. He grimaced, grabbed the bottle he kept wedged between the seat cushions, and took a swig. Being a drunk didn’t help matters either. And if he hadn’t been a drunk, he’d still be lazy. And if he hadn’t been lazy, he’d still be scared. And no shame on earth came close to that—except being married to Ermel—because if he saw a better life lying on the ground, he’d walk right past it and then cry for a week that he’d been too afraid to pick it up. He ran scared, plain and simple.

Normally Dorthea
wanted nothing to do with him, especially if it meant being seen in his broken-down truck. Besides the way it looked and smelled and sounded, she didn’t like the fact that everyone in town knew he used it to deliver bootleg liquor. He delivered the good stuff from Canada just as much as the cheap sour mash made by his brothers and uncles in Santa Marcela, but that didn’t make any difference to Dorthea; people talked and she didn’t like giving them things to talk about. Her dad also had a bad habit of getting beaten and robbed, and Dorthea didn’t care to have anything to do with that either. Today, however, none of those things mattered in the slightest because he had a delivery up at the top of the hill, right next to Sunny Slope Manor, closer than she’d ever been before, and she’d have gladly suffered any amount of embarrassment or danger for that privilege.

She sat back in the lumpy seat and listened to the sounds
of that hot September afternoon: the clackety-clack of the engine, the clinking bottles in the back, the rattle of the rickety wood panels that kept the boxes in the truck, the whipping of the tarp that covered the liquor, the moaning and creaking of the worn-out truck as it bounced from one pothole to another.

When they left her side of town and crossed over the railroad tracks
, the road smoothed. They turned left onto Center Street and followed it as it curved to the right toward the hill.

In
the town of Prospect Park, you either lived "on the hill" or "down the hill"; you either belonged or you didn’t. Like a giant winnowing station, Prospect Park had a way of putting people in their place.

Suddenly she sat up in her seat
and said, “Stop!”

Jeb
stomped on the brakes and hit his head on the roof. The tires screeched and the bottles banged together as the boxes slid forward. His eyes darted left and right, searching for trouble. They didn’t find any. He turned and glared at her. Dorthea knew by the clenched jaw and blazing eyes that she’d gotten herself into trouble. He grabbed her face with his dirty hand and said, “What are you doing? Do you hear me? What’s the matter with you?”

She knew to keep her mouth shut and wait for the storm to pass.
After a few seconds he released her and she slunk down in the seat and studied her ugly, warped shoes.

“I…just ain’t never seen it this close before…that’s all. I just wanted to see
the manor…”

“
‘See the manor?’” he slurred. “You wanna give me a heart attack over that? I swear girl you’re gonna be the death of me…and probably a fair number of other people too.” He took a swig from his bottle, hunched back over the steering wheel, and started driving again. The storm had passed.

Dorthea
’s eyes climbed upward until they once again found Sunny Slope Manor resting majestically in the heavens. She reverently beheld the vision—from the gently sloping, velvety lawn, to the wide and welcoming front porch steps, from the noble towers on the east and west that watched over the estate with perfect dignity, to the intricately cut wood shingles that adorned every inch of every wall. Her eyes combed both porches, top and bottom, searching for life, even for the faintest image of a rocking chair or a lounge or any other object that this perfect family had actually touched.

She didn’t care what her dad
said; in her eyes the Newfields were a royal family, as royal as any family in England, and a far sight more royal than Judith and Abigail. She might be dirt herself, but compared to the Newfields, Judith and Abbey didn’t look much better.

The truck
turned into a driveway farther down the road and Sunny Slope Manor disappeared from view.

“You know where we are?” asked her dad.

She saw a giant “T” on the wrought iron gate in front of them. Her eyes got big. “Yes,” she said. “This is where Judith and Abigail live.”

He talked to the man who
’d come out of the little house by the gate. The man pulled on a bar and the gate opened. Jeb turned back to Dorthea and said, “That’s right, but you don’t gotta tell Ermel we delivered up here. She don’t like to hear about this place. Besides, it all happened a long time ago and they ain’t nothin’ to us no more. Some big shindig is gonna happen up here, so I gotta deliver. That’s all there is to it. But you don’t gotta tell Ermel.”

“Ok,” said Dorthea.

Then the truck belched and farted its way up the long driveway and Dorthea wanted to die. She looked at her dress, the best one she owned but still an antique with a floppy collar and puffy long sleeves, and she honestly thought about jumping out of the truck. Girls her age dressed like Clara Bow, in short dresses and tight fitting hats—and definitely not puffy sleeves. Compared to them, she looked like Little Bo Peep. She hid from view by scooching down in the seat. Her father looked down at her and she hoped he didn’t ask any questions because she didn’t have an answer that actually made sense; she wanted to see Judith and Abbey’s house…and she didn’t want to see it. Her head told her that they could take their fancy mansion and jump off a cliff. Her heart told her to open her eyes to see the full extent of her misery, to see every breathtaking detail of that which she had lost. She wanted to look and she didn’t want to look…so she did the logical thing and peeked. She sat up just a smidge, peeked out the window, and caught an occasional glimpse, not of Toomington Hall, but of Sunny Slope Manor. Good, she thought, let Sunny Slope tower over them. Let it steal their sunshine and cover their moon and deflect the starlight from their greedy little eyes. And then the truck came into a clearing and she saw Toomington Hall from afar. Even with Sunny Slope towering overhead, it still looked good, better than good, and the closer she got, the better it looked. She had to admit it.

Dorthea knew a good Queen Anne when she saw
it because she knew Sunny Slope Manor. The Sunday funny papers in the Prospect Park Tribune did nothing for her except clutter the path to a weekly column entitled “Top O’ The Hill,” which devoted its ink solely to the manor and which never found a detail too small to report. She knew turrets and towers and roofs shaped like candle snuffers; gables and fish scales and gingerbread siding; bay windows, arched windows, and little stained glass windows. And she knew other interesting things, unrelated to architecture, like how many feet of copper rain gutter snaked beneath the eaves and what year the elevators got installed. What she didn’t get from the newspaper, she got from the chamber of commerce, where they knew her by name because she pestered them for old booklets and brochures and told them she liked their stuff best because the extra glitz made Sunny Slope Manor look like a movie star; and from Smiley Library, where the librarians knew not to put her off when she got wind of an old-timer’s town history or self-published biography which might contain hidden nuggets of Sunny Slope trivia and which most likely lay buried in the basement underneath a mountain of other forgettable library donations.

The
numerous Queen Annes down the hill didn’t inspire her in the least. A simple walk up to town, once she passed lowly Pine Street, which didn’t boast any style at all, brought her past one Queen Anne after another, each similar in style to the manor, just on a smaller scale. But to her they looked old and tired, inhabited by old and tired people, who sat on their front porches talking to their old and tired cats. And that was the best of them. The others looked downright decrepit. These imposters didn’t compare at all. Sunny Slope Manor stood proudly like a fine lady in diamonds. All the others looked like pool hall tramps decked out in tarnished baubles.

And that’s
also where she had conveniently delegated Toomington Hall, until now, when she saw it in person, and had to admit that not one, but two fine ladies graced the top of Prospect Park.

T
hey drove past the circular drive in front, thankfully, and continued on around the right side of the house until turning left onto a gravel road which led to the back. When they approached the back porch, her father slowed to an uncomfortable crawl, but Dorthea didn’t see anybody, and, more importantly, nobody saw her. After passing the porch on the left and a big hedge that jutted from the back of the house to the driveway, they pulled into a parking spot next to the house. He turned off the engine and Dorthea looked at him expectantly. He took a wrinkled hanky from the chest pocket of his dirty overalls. Dorthea closed her eyes, leaned against the door, and wondered why, of all times, did he have to do this now? Nobody on earth cleaned their nostrils like Jeb Railer. She listened to the one-note trombone player blow like a maniac and wondered if people sometimes died of misery. Finally, he stuffed the wet hanky back into his pocket and spoke.

“Now all you gotta do is stand guard. There ain’t nothin’ to it
, but you gotta stay close ‘cause when it comes to stealin’, the kids up here are just like the ones down there, only worse, ‘cause to them stealin’ from a workin’ man ain’t stealin’. You gotta keep watch, you hear?”

Dorthea nodded her head
unenthusiastically.

He got out of the truck and she
followed. After piling boxes of liquor onto a cart with wheels, he took a big stick, about the size of a baseball bat, except cut square, and held it against the stack of boxes as he wrapped the cart belt around everything. The stick acted like a brace and locked the boxes into place.

He scrunched his face as he struggled to tilt the cart back on its wheels
. Then he looked at her and said, “It’s gonna take a while ‘cause I gotta haul ‘em down to the cellar. And there are empties to haul back up. Then I’ll be back for the next load. You stick close by and if you do a good job there’s two bits in it for you.”

Dorthea
rolled her eyes. He wrestled the cart out into the gravel driveway before turning and disappearing behind the big hedge.

Standing
out in the open in a rag-a-muffin dress, guarding a broken down jalopy, didn’t interest Dorthea in the least. She climbed back into the truck on the driver’s side and slouched down. “Big deal,” she mumbled, “two bits and five seconds to see the manor. He could’ve at least stopped in front of the gate for a minute to let me look.” She banged her foot repeatedly on the brake pedal. “He knows how I feel about the place.” She looked out the windshield at a big bush shaped like a giraffe and another one shaped like an elephant. A nearby tree had been shaped like a giant umbrella. Even their trees looked different. Probably trimmed by a famous artist. She banged on the pedal and thought about sneaking off to get another look at the manor, then thought better of it. With her luck she’d run into Judith and Abigail and end up looking like Dumb Dora. She banged on the pedal some more and grumbled about her sorry life. Bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang—. Her leg suddenly froze. She’d heard a noise, laughter, and immediately feared someone had caught sight of her and had busted out laughing. She held her breath and listened, but it didn’t sound close, and didn’t come from inside the house to her left, or from behind the truck. Staying low and sliding over to the passenger’s side, she heard it more clearly, but not well enough to make out any words. She peeked out the window and saw a garden path that led down a small hill before disappearing behind some weeping willow trees. That’s where it came from, down that path, a girl, maybe two, not laughing at her, but probably at some stupid thing that only silly girls laugh at.